Mass-Banning

So hypothetically a person bought an armbrace yesterday for 100K + 40 ectos and turned it in for a tormented weapon (customize too) has nothing to fear?

if hundreds of people were perma-banned because they knowingly duped items, which they probably also knew was against the eula, what percentage of those people would post a "unban" me thread on these forums?

maybe a handful, if that?

i sure as hell wouldnt be posting a "unban me" thread if i knowingly exploited the game to increase my personal ingame wealth and got caught.

Ha...I say ha because everyone that got banned is a victim.
Their guild never did a thing, they never did a thing, they didn't know.
It's funny, people try to cheat, take shortcuts, etc. they get caught and all of a sudden the world is wrong and everyone is picking on them.
Who cares how many people got banned..10-100-10,000, idfm, the pointis that you cheated, got caught and now suffer the consequences. A good life lesson, use it later on.

In my experience, the ones that scream the loudest are the ones who are the most guilty.

And bringing up bots...that's a joke.
Different issue all together.

I am sure there are new, unknown people to us posting on other sites regarding their ban. GWOnline, GWLatino, Guild Hall, Foreign Language Sites etc. Then there are those who dont even most on forums.

I must not have made myself clear. The comment about "single digit bans" was in relation to a guild where six members were reported as banned. The number of bans exceeded single digits, yes.

Dumb question maybe... but that's how I gain knowledge.

Everybody is focused on the armbraces, but were they able to duplicate the rare mini-pets they were so eager to pay a bazillion armbraces for as well using the same method Chunky Monkey detailed for us in the other thread (http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...ostcount=909)? I mean if they were out in the mission with their Kanaxai, and they reconnected on two computers, did the Kanaxai reappear as well?

If it's possible, is there a way for ANet to count how many rare minis are in the wild now and compare to how many they actually released?

Gaile, just want to say, you guys did a fantastic job cleaning this huge mess. Of course, there is still the issue about the hit to the economy, but I think it's fairly trivial and will work its way out (I hope).

At least now it's very clear how greedy people can be (OMG you're giving me 7 stacks of armbraces/ecto/tokens/blah for free!? Accept! Accept! Accept!). I kinda feel bad for anyone caught in the crossfire, and I hope they see justice, like the ones who thought they were legitimately selling their rare minipet for an [albeit super-high] offer of several armbraces, only to find they were accepting duped items and banned (I hope that didn't happen).

I dont get why people are still buggin on the one armbrace deals.Its been said in multiple threads by Gaile herself even. they are looking into this exstensivly and its deal with multi. armbraces that are banned. Shes even said that some that are banned now can get their accounts back with a simple e-mail. So for everyone concerned about getting an armbrace last week...breathe if you have nothing to worry about, dont worry.

It was quite high, as I recall. What happened was that ANet ran a much more aggressive bot sweep than normal which apparently had looser parameters than it should have. A fair chunk of the posters here that weekend apparently were as guilty as could be and tried to play it off as though they were not.

You say you wouldn't come post an unban me thread, but then you wouldn't dupe, either. Someone that DID dupe has more of an interest than the average bear in restoring access to their account. Plus, anyone that has the unmitigated arrogance or greed to dupe items for personal profit probably also lacks the level of shame you or I would have about getting caught.

Then disregard everything I said about numbers being wrong etc.

Although it would be most interesting to eventually find out how many people got banned and a possible breakdown e.g. banned for duping, banned for accepting insane amounts of an item, banned for trading for insane amounts of an item etc. Would be a nice deterent for potential future EULA breakers.

in response to Darth Zach's thread which is being appended here:

I'm getting incredibly annoyed by the so called experts on the situation, who, equipped with their 20/20 vision of the past, now cast doubt and blame on people who traded their rare minipets for the armbraces.

I don't understand why if a few months ago someone traded close to 3000 ectos for a crystalline, WHY would it be that impossible for someone to have accumulated through whatever means 250 armbraces.

get off of your high horses people, there is not ONE person who would not have made that trade ESPECIALLY if you only ended up giving many of them to your guild any way. and an island guardian is one of the rarest minipets, so to the person who said it's only worth 100k, gg for knowing the market.

screaming "ban them all" is ignorant. if you are a seller and you are offered more than what it is worth, it is only common sense to accept. did any one truly think there was a way to duplicate items in GW? if you say yes, you're full of shit. and it's irresponsible for Anet to put that blame on people.

Let's be honest, Max Gladius' thread is the only reason Anet knows anything about the duping, Fenix and his friend then informed Anet of how it was done BECAUSE they gained information through that thread. Anet had no idea what was going on before that thread was created, and if they dont know that items were being duped, why the hell should people like Zach be expected to? There is a big difference, though, between Zach and chunky. Zach made a trade, an insanely profitable trade which anyone would have taken. According to chunky though he was given 7(+) stacks of armbraces which would have tipped anyone off, something is wrong.

Thank you!!! People please, you got banned, deal. If you plan to hack and cheat you don't deserve to play. If you don't have enough common sense to know what you are doing is wrong, or if something is wrong with what is going on (such as getting 250 armbraces for 100k or a minipet) then you shouldn't be playing GW because DING fries are ready!!! Common sense and a bit of inteligence help you determine what is right in real life, dont think being online makes a difference!!!

To their knowledge duping was not possible, and such statements were made 'in the past', probably well before reconnects(as they are incredibly new). And even if DoA is easier to access, some of the numbers being offered were quite absurd, hence my next statement.
I'm rather out of the loop on certain things, as I'm semi-retired from the game. But even I know that an Armbrace of Truth is worth a phenomenal amount(if nothing else, in time and effort). The assumption is not that they'll realize that a single armbrace is worth a certain amount, but as several threads realized, having over 1000 offered makes some alarms go off. If I'm selling anything and were to get offered more than single digits for any item, I'd probably assume that something wasn't quite right, even if I didn't think "dupe"
Hindsight is 20/20. Ecto drops back in December could have been explained by a lot of things I'm sure(though some may be a bit of a stretch). And as for saying they should have suspected there was a problem when people first started talking about it, did you? Everyone is always skeptical when something like this crops up, just like when the Legendary Defender of Ascalon title popped into existence. But now that suspicions have been confirmed by screenies, etc, Anet appears to be working round the clock to fix the problem. I wouldn't exactly call them a huge part of the problem for taking action when they knew what action to take...

But that's just my two cents

Edit: 1) Yes, what about the shiny things? what's being done about the shinies?
2) it rather sucks that this had to happen so soon after Gaile's b-day, kinda ruins the whole month...

How the hell do you still have the cajones to even show yourself, let alone continue to profess your innocence after that screenshot Max posted of you flashing 1,750 Armbraces? Just go away, and take your clan mates with you. Seriously!

The problem there would have been finding ways to move them. What broke this whole thing to light was offers of thousands of armbraces for Kanaxai/Panda. It appears that the people that were foolish enough to get caught wanted those minis so that they could do exactly what you propose.

There are problems with duping the high-end minis for profit, however. The market for potential buyers is quite small. Reselling them in quantity would raise antennae just as the offers of huge numbers of armbraces did; the potential buyers of such items know the patterns of resale for these items and also know one another quite well.

Why take on these logistical problems when you can just dupe stacks of armbraces/ectos anyway? Both are much easier to move and convert into other forms of wealth.

If these pets were duped, they were duped by someone that knew about the dupe for months and was smart enough to produce only limited quantities and release them into the marketplace slowly. Or they were duped by someone who saw the writing on the wall and stashed them on alts that had nothing to do with the duping, so as to have them to sell after this whole mess blows over.

It's a safe bet that some of the existing supply of minis were lost forever on accounts that were duping, however (as these transactions are known to have occurred).

First, I just wanted to thank you for talking to the community about the actions being taken.

Questions: (if they've already been asked and answered, I apologize)


(1) Right now, can we safely buy and sell armbraces without fear of having our accounts banned?

"Very little to worry about" is actually a LOT to worry about when we're talking about banned accounts.


(2) Will the reconnect feature be back, and if so, when?

I really don't want to enter DoA until reconnects are resumed. Hopefully, they'll be added back soon.


Thanks Gaile.

Since this is the fresher string, I think maybe I could re-post this and somehow achieve the appropriate notice and response.\





Whatever happens in the armbrace issue happens.. the one issue i'm SICK OF READING AND HEARING ABOUT IS ECTOS!!

Guys... let's set the record straight. Over the winter we had winterfest.. everyone was on break.. people were beating Nightfall with their paragons and dervies and ectos became a commodity because well.. FoW armor on their new characters. Makes sense right? Now.. between that time and when Hard Mode came around... ectos dropped to 9k each at the mat trader. Seeing as the market is something I actively watch, this is something i paid attention to. Now... with that said, when Hard Mode was unleashed and suddenly scrolls came about for access to UW during times we didn't have favor, it exposed the ability to play in UW even more. Hard Mode introduced increased drops, UW scrolls introduced more chances for that to happen. Now... there was something that for a couple weeks i'd noticed that a lot of the long time players actually sold all their ectos, equip... everything and hoarded their gold and quit GW. I noticed this because a few friends of mine did it... several posts were here on guru of people actually selling their ectos and not in OVER abundance. I have 294 ectos myself. I want you guys to think about all these factors for a moment. One more thing to mention and i'm sure someone is going to want to say something... LOOT SCALING! For those who know it know that rare mats are unaffected by Loot Scaling, meaning that a person can still solo UW and farm ectos on his or her own. So you wanna know what happened to ectos? Look no further than what i just read. Are ectos duped? If they were duped... you honestly think they'd be 5.5k? No! Ectos would be about the same price as your ambers, jades, and steel ingots... NOT around the price of a ruby or diamond. So lets get our heads outta our backsides and wake up. One more thing... Ectos did spike briefly this past Thursday/Friday to 7k and then dropped suddenly (as expected) when the festival started. For those who have paid attention over the years... when a festival comes to town, ectos drop. Feel free to speculate, criticize... whatever all you want. You take 5 - 10 min to really think about it... look into it... see how ectos didn't just suddenly DROP overnight but rather trickled down over what was actually months... you'll see that I'm right.

don't blam anet blame the dupers if they never duped then there will never be a mass banning

Well maybe if your post was coherent and actually had a point you might have gotten a response the 1st time you posted it, but since it isn't and doesn't...... What are you on about?

The terms go something like this:

#19
GW rules of conduct

Thank you very much for your response Martin.

You mean duped by someone smart enough not to show off seven stacks of armbraces?

I think I'm going to cry...

YAY to anet for fixing the problem...now maybe i can get my ambrace

This dilema has rasied a few questions about later aspects of the game where duping could be possible. If any mods or Gaile would like to hear me out on a possible dup scenario please pm me on guru.I dont want to elaborate and give any ideas to poss. dupers. But i would like to voice my concern and dont really know where to do so.

Sure. My guild used to consist of me, my mule account, and some guy from Australia. 3 whole accounts. It's closer to 30 now, but it is very possible for an "entire guild" to be less than 10 members. Only need 8 to GvG (or you should only need 8... there is disgruntlement about including heroes atm).

That's completely not fair to say. Many people, myself included, bought tormented items/armbraces NOT in stacks, but only one because they had aimed to buy it previously.

I know I found a 100k +50E Sheild, so I bought it. Hours later, I learned of the incident and am now rushing emails to Anet asking them if the code on my item is legitamate, or if my account is at risk.



Stop generalizing. If you think I deserve a ban for that, you need to reprioritize.

I can imgaine these numbers got quite high, since it was common knowledge on the forums for a at least an hour or two before reconnects were disabled. Word spreads fast and entire guilds probably learn how to exploit this leeding to a lot of bans.

I'm very pleased with efficiency you guys have in cleaning this mess up though. Congradulations and I hope it has little effect on business in the future The ban sweep parameters seem very thorough as they got the guys who tested with just a single red dye. Its reassuring this will have should hopefully have little impact.

Just in case anyone has not done the math.


250 Armbraces times 100k 50e

250 times 100k = 25,000k

250 times 50e = 12,500e

12,500e times 5k = 62,500k

Total = 87, 500k


250 times 70e = 17500e

70e time 5k = 87,500k


I am just showing the math for ONE stack, which is absurdly high.


87,500 time 7 = 612,500k



Of course before anyone was able to sell off 7 stacks the market would have been dead for most everything so they would not be making nearly the totals.

I am the father of this particular post name. My 14 year old son was banned and all he could talk about was Guild Wars. He spent many hours this summer playing and was very excited about the upcoming release of the new game. He is still uncertain what he may have done wrong because he tried to log on and just received a message that he was banned, no warning, no explanatory message, and no evidence presented of intentional wrongdoing on his part. I have a hard time believing he is one of less than ten across the world who have been banned for something he claims he doesn't even know anything about. He feels wrongly accused and punished and I am taking him to Game Stop tomorrow to transfer his early reservation from Guild Wars to Halo 3. I am sure something needed to be done for people who do this duping thing everyone is talking about, but I am pretty sure my son isn't one of them and since he received no warning, as the legal section of the website indicates, I call it yet another episode of idiotic Texas justice out of Austin.

I am very impressed by the way Anet handled this whole issue! Great job on punishing offenders. I also hope that some bans that were done to victims of the whole scam will be analyzed carefully, so only the evildoers will suffer the consequences.

Congrats of swift and precise action

With an Avatar like Gonzo, I wouldn't expect you to know what coherent is. I've re-read over what i've said and it makes sense to me. What i'm getting to in there is that there have been alot of noticeable factors that no one seems to be taking account of in regards to why the drop in ectos. Let me break it down a little bit easier for your uncomprehendable mind to follow.

1. Ectos spiked to 12k+ when people got their dervies and paragons through NF and wanted their FoW armor.
2. After weeks of that, obviously fewer and fewer people wanted FoW and prices drop to 9k. This trickled down over weeks.
3. After that, hard mode was introduced. This allowed for more frequent drops, ectos being one of them.
4. UW scrolls allowed for access to UW during moments we didn't have favor.
5. Long time players who accumulated a fair amount of ectos had literally quit the game, which was evident by a few that i knew as well as many posts i'd seen on guru of people unloading 200+ ectos and various greens/golds and declaring they were quitting the game. That in itself puts alot of ectos back into the market, creating even less of a merchant demand.
6. With the intro of Loot Scaling, ectos, because they are a rare material, were unaffected so to allow for continued solo farming for them.
7. The drop in ecto prices didn't suddenly spike down overnight. This happened over a period of months. If a dupe like what happened to armbraces was really the situation, then we'd see ecto prices hovering around that of jades, ambers, and steel. We wouldn't see them around the prices of rubies and diamonds.
8. One thing i'd just remembered as well is that during that time we'd gone through several small holiday events as well as a couple of festivals. It should be well documented that when special events occur, they directly impact the market and especially the ecto market.

So there is that coherent enough for you? Broken down into parts rather than in one big paragraph? Several factors over a period of time that allowed for the drop in ectos broken down in such a way that actually makes perfect sense that as I said, when you take 5-10 min to think about, it actually makes SENSE! A few might be in denial and make it appear that ectos suddenly spiked down almost as if overnight, but that wasn't the case. I still remember times that during the whole fear of ectos dropping where i'd see the slow 500 gold every 2 weeks trickle down effect happening with ectos. For about a month if i remember, ectos were hovering between 6.5k and 7.5k before creeping down to the 5.5k state they are now. That isn't a sign of duping. Duping is a sudden immediate impact whereas this took several months.

I didn't dupe crap. The game logs show that. I didn't receive anything duped either, at least not to my knowledge. I just looked at the post from the turd running around with 1750 armbraces where he says how to do it. I don't even own two computers. Already ahead of you, created a support ticket the second I saw I was banned. But I'm guessing the high volume of support tickets others have created because they were unjustly banned too, are clogging up the system. If I get my ticket back and it shows that I received a mass quantity of something duped, then I'll shut my mouth and accept my ban. But honestly, I haven't received anything other than tokens this month, and I didn't hear about a duping problem till last night. Excuse me for not knowing I shouldn't accept 500 tokens from a guild mate, whom I helped acquire the tokens with.

it looks to me like some of the bannings have been done to STOP the spread of these items.

Since the dupers are frozen, the ones who have the duped items are next.

Thats what i see happening now.

If all you did was purchase a duped item, then go through the proper support and get your account back.

So someone who bought 250 armbraces of truth should be let off because he didn't know how much they were worth? If he didn't know what they were worth, why did he accept them as payment? If you had a rare mini, would you sell it to the first person who offered you 250 bolts of cloth for it?

What about if I buy an ambrace cheap for 50k , because the guy who is selling them is trying to get rid because he has stacks of em >?

ps i only buy one.

If you are his father, which I doubt, I would expect you to be grown up enough to understand why bans are done... especially considering you have a fairly young child, which I doubt you'd want hanging around unscrupulous sorts of people. Not just in the case of this dupe exploit, but in any ban where misconduct of any sort was found to have happened. Instead, however, you make childish comments to the effect of "idiotic Texas justice out of Austin." Mature, very.

I suggest reading through the thread, specifically posts from Gaile Gray, concerning what you should do if you feel you have been wrongly banned. PM Gaile the account information, she can surely have it checked out. Not only the exact reason why your son was banned, but find out exactly what evidence they have pertaining to the case. It may turn out that your son just so happened to be banned for something else around the same time that this duping incident occured. Spamming, swearing, racial slurs, scamming. Possibly even an accidental ban for, again, nothing at all connected to the dupe. Which can easily be found out and cleared up, if that is the case. Knee-jerk reactions are never a good thing. But, being a parent, you'd know that, right?

By the way, children never lie to their parents.

EDIT: I lol'd. S W O R d is in the same guild as our pals thechunkymonkey and MistsEle. Considering the connection, I'd say it's more than likely your son was involved. Direct knowledge or not may be an entirely different story, however due to the fact that we know for certain thechunkymonkey had these items, MistsEle declared that someone in their guild had given them and, well, "the rest of" their guild a bunch of armbraces, I'd say it's more than likely he had the items in question in his possession.

LMFAO at everyone who got banned. Don't be such a pansy next time and buy hacked items. Your fault, not Anets. And also, I highly doubt you just got "some" items. It was probably like 30armbrace, so they banned you. I think thats perfectly fair. Everyone with over... like 10 armbrace SHOULD be banned.

@ S W O R ds dad (lol)

"I am sure something needed to be done for people who do this duping thing everyone is talking about, but I am pretty sure my son isn't one of them and since he received no warning"

Sorry this isnt first grade, there are no warnings with exploiting games, thanks for playing.

Love it. Ban them all for the sake of this game.
love watching dupers like [ohno] cry now

Idk i found some guy spamming wtb char bag 60k.. so i sold them a char bag. After i sold it they asked what its function was .. with the banning i don't agree with more then a temp ban for those people that sold an item for a large amount of armbraces, just to control the duped items and if possible rollback the transaction. I don't want another Diablo 2 so gj on the bans i hope your records go back far enough to get every one of those jerks.

yes this sure sounds like the words from an innocent man. sound defensive much?

if u get banned theres probably a reason. seeing as ur from the same guild as chunky though, SEVERLY hurst ur credibilty.